Kids Under the Age of 16 Won’t Get Into ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in Russia Over Gay Character Controversy

A lot of Russian children will have to dust off their 1991 VHS tapes of Disney’s cartoon Beauty and the Beast, because they won’t be getting into the new live-action revival.

That’s because the highly anticipated Disney movie starring Emma Watson features a gay character, a subplot that offends a Russian politician, according to Billboard.

Russia’s Culture Ministry made the announcement on Tuesday, telling the Associated Press that the move was made to appease politician Vitaly Milonov, who called for a ban of the movie. Milonov was quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency as saying, the movie was “overt and shameless propaganda of sin and sexual perversion under the guise of a fairy tale.”

In 2013, Russia passed a law banning what the government called gay propaganda, which at the time, The Guardian reported included “spreading of ‘propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations’ among minors.”

The film has also been reportedly banned from at least one theater stateside for the same reason.